Tag Archives: Television

The Real World is back on MTV’s airwaves and they’ve changed the format on some things with the new “Ex-Plosion” season. Now, after putting the Real World cast into the house for a few weeks, MTV sends in the cast’s exes to live with them for the remainder of the show.

Poor Scholars’ own Pat Flynn and Scott Phillips broke down the new cast — and format — in an exchange conducted last week. The duo breaks down the cast, potential Challenge competitors and the man that was born to be on the Real World: Cory.

Dan Harmon, the creative force behind the famously self-aware show Community, has taken his talent for controlled insanity and brought it to a new medium: animation. After getting fired from Community’s fourth season, Harmon started shopping around his idea for a show where his more insane ideas could come to fruition, which meant removing the limit set by using real actors on a real stage. As a result, his new cartoon, Rick and Morty, watches like an unholy mixture of Futurama,Community, and Back to the Future, which just a hint of Family Guy raunch humor thrown in for good measure. Rick and Mortyis currently one of the highest rated shows in the coveted 18 – 45 male demographic, even beating out perennial favorite Archer. With that in mind, I watched the first six episodes to see if it lives up to all the hype.

Let’s talk talk shows. You have your young hotshots (Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon), your established mainstays (David Letterman, Craig Ferguson), and an edgy black (or perhaps red) sheep named Conan O’Brien. They’re all valuable parts of the after-hours spectrum, humerous and unique plenty of other buzzy words, but I’m not burning the late night oil for any of these noteworthy front men.

No, I plan to spend my late nights watching Late Night, otherwise known as the reason why Seth Meyers vacated the Weekend Update desk. Meyers’ new chapter as full-time host begins next Monday on NBC as he attempts to fill Fallon’s spacious shoes. Continue reading →

During the week, Poor Scholars staff members Scott Phillips and Brian Chimino, spend a lot of time talking about the latest and greatest that television has to offer.

Here’s Brian and Scott on a farewell to Troy Barnes from Community, the new ABC comedies on Wednesday night and the new plot twists for Shameless. As a courtesy to our readers, this post contains SPOILERS.

Is there any better Netflix/On Demand fodder than an episode of The Office? There simply is not. Whether you’re doing work, killing time or trying to fall asleep, the dedicated staff at Dunder Mifflin always has your back.

Archer returned for its highly anticipated fifth season this January, but it’s more of a reboot than a continuation. It even has a new name: Archer Vice. Before this season began, Adam Reed, the show’s creator, executive producer, and sole writer, let slip that he had gotten bored with writing about bungling spies, Cold War espionage, and covert missions, and would rather focus on something flashier: one literal ton of pure Colombian cocaine.

That’s right, Archer breaks bad. It wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination, as drug dealing fits right in with Archer’s boozing, partying, prostituting, and general morally ambiguous lifestyle. The new season brought a new decade of style to the show, as well.

Sometimes its fun to envision what your favorite movie would look like if it were produced for television. Television audiences crave the more detailed and drawn-out storytelling measures of the small screen, so at Poor Scholars we decided to take movies we enjoyed and pitch them as television shows. Of course, these would never actually happen — nor would we probably want to see network execs butcher our favorite movies — but it is fun to think about. This week, Poor Scholars’ Troy Phillips imagines Shutter Island as a television series.

Arrested Development has one of the most ravenous cult followings of any television show to ever air, but there were also many people who didn’t properly give the critically acclaimed comedy a chance as it got the ax after three seasons on Fox due to low ratings. Now with the return of Arrested Development’s new season exclusively to Netflix streaming on May 26th, the excitement is mounting for the return of the Bluth family. Over the next month, Poor Scholars will be unleashing plenty of Arrested Development-related content but since Poor Scholars’ own Troy Phillips was born in the ’90s and far too young to watch Arrested Development during its initial run — and knew little to nothing about the show other than our other staff members’ rave reviews — we assigned him the task of giving his unbiased opinion on the first three episodes of the series using a traffic lighting grading system that he created.